Heart Of
by Anidori-Kiladra
Summary: Rose really loved him at first, you know. Cal, that is. She thought her heart would burst with it. Rose/Cal, Rose/Jack


Heart Of

The first time Rose sees Cal Hockley, she can't catch her breath.

She's at Marie Groveland's cotillion. Her eighteenth birthday, Rose thinks, though of course she doesn't really know. She's only met Marie once before but somehow Mother's finagled them into this party, thinking if they rub elbows with the rich some is bound to rub off on them.

It works better than either Rose or her mother expect.

He's standing across the balcony from her. She sees him when she turns her back on the view, out and down across gardens Rose can't see the end of, braces her back against the railing and stares inside at couples dancing and gloved fingers touching and everyone smiling so hard their teeth must hurt. Rose knows hers do.

He's standing there, his back straight and a look on his face like he finds this as ridiculous as she does. His mouth turned up in a smirk and his hands clasped behind his back, so straight and so tall that Rose knows he'd stay standing even if she fell against him. And Lord, how she wants to fall.

She doesn't let herself, though. Not yet.

She just leans back farther, pushes her chest out more, sets her eyes on him, laying them heavy on his forehead and his lips and that strong chest under his waistcoat until she knows he can't help but feel them. And as surely as Rose knows this is the last nice dress she has that fits her, the man who will be Cal Hockley glances over at her, catches her eyes and rolls his at the spectacle inside, then walks across the expanse of balcony to join her.

"Beautiful night," he says.

"Out here it is, anyway," Rose returns.

"These things can get so tiresome," he says. "Give me brandy and a cigar and some real conversation over a flippery girl's excuse for desperation any day."

His voice is cutting and it cuts right through her, leaving a blazing trail of sparking nerve endings in its place. They tingle pleasantly, hot and bright, and Rose flashes a smile at him.

"You don't mince words, do you, Mr...?"

"Hockley. Cal Hockley."

He holds out his hand and she puts hers in it, shakes it firmly before he raises hers to his mouth, and that leaves a hot, tingling trail of its own.

Cal comes to see her the next day, and the one after. Every day for two weeks they go riding or walking or taking tea in the sitting room of the Dewitt Bukaters' rented London townhouse, and all of a sudden it's like all the things Rose has hated and dreaded for years take on new life. She takes on new life, with Cal.

Cal is solid and smart and strong. He knows what he wants and he knows how to get it, and he can be wicked, puling Rose behind doorways and around columns at dances, stealing a kiss and wrapping his hand hard around her waist, tugging and insistent.

He isn't her first. No, that dubious honor belongs to Nathaniel Winston-Brown, giggling and tipsy on their parents' wine one summer night at a garden party when she was fifteen. But with Cal, this is the first time Rose looks up into his face, smoothes her palm across his cheek and thinks: This is a man. This is a man and I love him.

It doesn't last very long.

When she is with him, Rose feels light, sails along through their courtship and carefully doesn't notice the way he sometimes talks over her or grabs her hand too hard until after he's proposed, because she tells herself that he means well and he's only behaving as he's been taught, and then in a louder voice that they need this.

But by the time he places that diamond around her neck aboard the Titanic, everything feels so heavy that it might as well weigh her down straight to the bottom of the ocean. That—anywhere—would be better than here.

Jack is better than all of them. Everyone sitting at these tables, drowning in their corsets and furs and vicious polite conversation. Jack's got something Rose has never seen, something no one else she knows will ever have, something she wants to bad her insides could ache for it. Jack has nothing to hide, to motives to propel him forward but the ones he wears on his sleeve, and Rose wants to consume him if only in the hopes that some of that might rub off onto her. She thinks that she could love him forever for it.

For the way he laughs at her and teaches her to spit, for the way he looks so young with his hair combed back at dinner, for the way he twirls her belowdecks and the way he kisses her. For all that, Rose feels like she can finally breathe again. If not for that, she doesn't know how she'd be able to come up for air.

She'll run, she decides. She'll run and they'll run together, and anywhere will be better than here.

Then the iceberg hits. And there's nowhere left but here.

Rose can't think, can't see past the blur of everything that isn't Jack, until he's back in her arms again. They won't tear them apart, won't put her on a lifeboat like they think she can live while he might be dying, think she can sit still when she's got to be running, has to be with him or there's nothing else.

Her body's never felt anything like the love and panic and joy that courses through her when they meet at the bottom of the stairs, but her mind knows the clutch of his too tight hands on her, shaking her, knows the anger of a man mistaking love for something else.

Rose has to remind herself that Jack isn't Cal, that two days are enough to see that there's too much good in him to ever allow something like that badness in, and she tries not to think about the full, hot touch she was sure was Cal's love for so long, has to stop thinking when she is interrupted by his cold gun instead.

After that, everything's cold. Jack's hands are tight on hers in the frigid water, but this is a different sort of tightness, one Rose wouldn't let go of for the world.

When she does, she knows nothing will ever be quite warm enough ever again.

After it's all over, she takes his name. She doesn't want hers anymore, a name for the past and for mistakes she won't make again. After it's all over, Rose Dawson stands in the rain and vows that she will be even stronger next time.


End file.
